Clean Prophets, Winter Flowers, Dead Meadow @ SFCA Great American Music Hall 4 February 2006

This was my first time attending the Great American Music Hall and I think it's pretty much the stereotypical San Francisco concert space: A converted ballroom or theater with a lot of sad rococo ornamentation and a reasonably large stage. It was certainly an appropriate place for the likes of Dead Meadow, what with their deliberate mining not precisely of the stoner-rock vein being plied by most bands they are lumped together with, but a far more psychedelic, acid style once typified by Iron Butterfly, Blue Cheer, and Jimi Hendrix. Hippie music, in short.

First up were the Clean Prophets. My friend Jerry and I lasted through three songs before we retreated to the sidewalk to smoke. The CPs were not bad, per se. I'll explain it like this: When you start a band, ideally what you do is jam for a little while together, figure out how your band fits together, and then write a couple songs. Then, when you've rehearsed the fuck out of those songs, you throw them away and write six new songs. Then you play your first show. Clean Prophets were clearly playing out on their first six songs. They were tight enough, but stylistically they lurched all over the fuzzy end of the mainstream: Here's some U2, here's some Coldplay, here's some Strokes - you could basically identify the individual songs they were emulating. According to Jerry they were also pilfering heavily from the last Alkaline Trio record.

The Clean Prophets were followed by Winter Flowers, and I'll bet whoever was booking the show thought they had scored some kind of post-modern/ironic retro-minded San Francisco bill-scheduling coup. Winter Flowers dressed like hippies.
The kind that would eventually become New Agers, not the kind that would eventually become survivalists or sell-outs. Renn Fayre hippies. Lots of paisley, formless shifts, flowing hair, handlebar moustaches. They sounded like they looked: a late-60s Mamas and the Papas/Simon& Garfunkel/Sam & Dave (not really) amalgamation of American coffee-shop folk rock and fey "Celtic" folk. Back in the day this band could have opened for Fairport Convention or Pentangle, and I would have given them the same review. It is depressing that now, under the wider banner of Rock And Roll, a sort of music that's always been at least a little bit about shocking your parents, we have bands like this, who are revisiting music that my mom, aged twenty, considered corny.

The headliners of the night were Dead Meadow. I had seen Dead Meadow once before, opening for the Super Furry Animals in Indianapolis in 2002 or so, and is show was not quite up to that stellar performance. This is probably due to the fact that their openers were weak, the venue was large and fairly impersonal, and they didn't have SFA's state of the art a/v gear to help out their light show. The set was heavy on unfamiliar material, presumably from their forthcoming album, sprinkled with a few songs from earlier albums.